The Final Sorrow
by namewithheld
Summary: Adam gets a visit from one Joan's many mysterious friends and gets treated to a metaphor involving cigarettes. Heavy on the angst. Please review.


Title: The Final Sorrow

Author: Tote

Genre: angst. No, seriously. You thought my other stories had angst? Not compared to this one, baby, brace yourself.

Rating: PG, but with warning: I cried a little when I wrote this and I've never had that happen before in my entire life. So, yeah, PG but very sad.

A/N: I've always wanted to write a story with God appearing to someone other than Joan. It occurred to me that Adam must have a lot of things to discuss if he ever got the chance. Thanks to everyone who reviewed Running Home and With Her Heart between His Teeth. Especially Teejay and Unchallenged's about Running Home, I always look forward to your opinions and I'm never disappointed. Sorry about the delay for With Her Heart between His Teeth's sequel: it's in the works.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, there was always guilt. It pressed on him. It cast dark shadows. It twisted the metal in his art to grotesque figures that screamed his writhing pain. He never made beautiful things anymore.

Yes, he was guilty. Yes, he had gone to Bonnie's, knowing the price and knowing his hunger and rating the one above the other.

Yes, he had done all these things.

But the little demon inside him whispered that no matter, no matter how much he had done, it was, on some small level, not totally his fault, not completely.

He had dealt all his life with his mother's periods of great joy and her sudden, overpowering sorrows. And when she'd swallowed pills and left him a note, he'd learned to cook for his Dad and to ignore the note and retreat behind the mask he wore while welding: if he cried, he did it in private. He just looked distant in November.

And when Joan, beautiful Jane, swept him up into her world and took him out of himself, only to smash apart his best work with all the power she could muster, he hadn't pressed charges. He'd cried in front of her though, and that was something that shamed him later.

But he'd forgiven her, even if he'd never understood her reasons, only that she'd had them and that was all he needed, in the end.

When she kissed him, only to kill his hopes later, at her party, he'd been her friend.

When he reached for her hand in his shed, weeks later when he'd just begun dating Iris, and she opened it to him like a magic door into a world of possibility, he'd wasted hardly any time in leaving Iris.

When his Dad hurt his back, lost his job and couldn't even afford the medicine to soothe his pain, hadn't Adam taken that horrible job at the hotel? He worked like a dog till his hands were raw and he began to think that he may never have more than this, than just barely struggling to keep his head above water.

Every doubt that surfaced in Jane, he soothed. Every love for him she had, he answered. When he told her, crying in a hotel room, that he loved her and she didn't say it back (never said it back, in fact) he'd taken the pain without complaint, because having her seemed like enough at the time.

Then, when they grew farther and farther apart and his need to have her, really have her, seemed to cry out inside him like a screaming child that he could not silence, he ignored it for as long as he could. When she said no to him in the camper, he didn't push. He stayed away.

Then there was Bonnie.

Bonnie, with her easy, willing body and her dark eyes that, if you squinted a little, looked like Joan's in a certain light.

And a mistake.

But, the demon asked inside him: didn't life owe him something? After all his torment, all his pain, all his sadness, wasn't one mistake his reward? After so many years of being silent and understanding, of bearing others' pain without complaint, couldn't he give into temptation _one time?_

In the court room, he had felt his whole fate, the fate of the world depending on whether she could forgive him. He'd said: "I don't blame you for not wanting to sleep with me," and yes, he'd meant it. He could never blame Jane.

But that didn't mean he wasn't blaming someone, and it wasn't Bonnie.

And it wasn't himself, not for all of it.

"Hello, Adam."

The voice was soft, softer than a petal falling on concrete and filled to the rim with a sadness even he could not begin to delve into imagining.

He turned and saw a pale brunette with very wide eyes, not a bit like Joan, only shorter and not nearly as beautiful. But that, he reflected, could be said of anyone. He'd seen her hanging around Joan the last couple of days, whenever Ryan was around.

But he'd never heard her voice; she'd never spoken to him before. It took him a moment to realize that she'd entered his shed without so much as a sound. "How did you get in here?" he asked, staring at her, mystified.

She smiled like the Cheshire cat but said nothing.

"Um…" he cleared his throat, wondering why he couldn't stop seem to move, or think of anything to say at all. He felt trapped, hunted. "You're a—a friend of Jane's. Right?"

The girl nodded, almost imperceptibly. "You could say that," she said, but her voice seemed to suggest that wasn't the whole story. Stepping forward, she touched his latest piece, his latest monstrosity.

When Adam had shown it to his father, Carl said: "Genius, son," and from his proud but worried eyes Adam had discerned that his father saw nothing different in this piece from the others he'd made. But from the way the girl ran long piano-fingers across it, her eyes thoughtful, her lip curling…he thought she might be seeing it, the way he'd meant it to be seen. And for that, he didn't tell her to leave.

"This is ugly," she said, her voice not unkind but honest, pensive. Her fingers touched wires bent and tattered and she sighed softly, wistfully.

Adam watched as she turned from it and looked over at a piece he'd made about six months ago, back when loving Jane had felt like something to thank God for. It seemed to shimmer in the shadows there and the girl lifted one finger to press against its center, where metal had been twisted into the rough shape of a rose. "You seem sad."

She shrugged. "It's an emotion you understand very well." Her eyes met Adam's. "Where did something so ugly come from?" she asked, nodding her head back to the angry artwork on the table, "after you made something so beautiful?"

Adam swallowed hard, looking down at his hands, at the burn that ran from his thumb to the middle of his hand. "I don't know."

The girl gave him a pointed look.

"Maybe there was something ugly inside of me," he said after a moment of being held captive in a gaze that could see through him, "maybe I was all out of perfect things."

The girl, shrugging, as if she really didn't care, sat down in the stool in front of the table, opposite him. She stuck a hand into her jacket pocket and retrieved a pack of French cigarettes. Adam frowned, not figuring her for a smoker.

She took a single cigarette out and held it between her middle and index finger, gazing at Adam all the while. "Do you have a problem with smoking, Adam?"

Adam shifted uncomfortably. "It kills people. I have a problem with stuff like that."

The girl smiled slightly, rolling it over her fingers. "But what if I smoked one and then I quit tomorrow morning?" Her eyes seemed to challenge him.

"It's already in your system. Plus, you know, if you've been smoking with people around…second-hand smoke—" he stumbled over his words, unsure why he felt so suddenly ashamed.

"—kills," the girl finished for him and with a smile that seemed to sparkle, she took the cigarette and broke it in half. "So, we've come to a conclusion."

Adam sighed, his confusion reminding him of Jane, and Jane made him feel more lost than ever. "We have?"

"Giving into doing something we know is bad, it doesn't just affect us, it affects those around us." She looked at him pointedly again, arching one eyebrow.

Adam scowled at her: yeah, she was certainly a friend of Joan's. "Look, I don't need someone coming here to tell me it was wrong with a cigarette metaphor. I know that."

The girl raised both eyebrows, unimpressed. "Then why'd you do it?"

Adam looked away, ran his fingers through his tangle of wavy hair, his irritation growing, "I don't know, I was stupid, okay?"

"Not okay. You do know."

"No," Adam said heatedly, now getting up off his chair and staring down at her, his anger rising: "I don't. Get out of my shed."

The girl remained sitting, staring up at him with a sudden, startling sadness. "I hate seeing you like this, Adam. It's one thing to lie to everyone else, but to yourself? To me?" she paused, taking the sight of him in as if he was a lost, sick child or a lamb that lost their way and came back wounded, "but your faith…your faith hasn't shaken since you lost her. You curse me, hate me…but you always believe."

The girl looked away from him and the light from the lamp illuminated her face, glowing around her head like a halo.

Understanding blossomed from somewhere deep inside, from someplace that wasn't dead yet. It bloomed in his heart first, where it could take root. His mind lagged behind, rejecting the concept, even as his hands began to shake and his body tingled with knowledge.

"You…" and he remembered Jane in the hospital and her face when he told her earnestly that he believed that she believed and the list he'd made…"You."

"Adelaide Roncalli, an Italian woman, she began having visions of the holy family at age 7. John Cleary, he's a grandfather in Rochester, New York, daily messages. The list went on, but Joan never gave you a chance to finish." The girl looked up at him, watching him with a gentleness that made him…

He sunk down to his chair, tears streaming down his face. "My mom…" he whispered, staring at the girl, trembling as she looked back, composed and calm, "My Dad losing his job, his back, Jane—that was all you. That was all you."

"Debatable," God replied, not unkindly. She smiled. "Free will is a concept you guys find really hard to grasp. I made you, but I left you with the power to choose. Your choices affect others, and their choices affect still more..."

"Ripples." Adam couldn't breathe.

"Right," God agreed, smiling a little. "One of my more effective metaphors."

"How…?" he shook his head, all his questions choking him at once.

"You see me because you need me tonight. You see me like this because this form is acceptable to you, familiar." She looked at him, frowning, and reached over the table to cover his hand with Her own.

"I hate you," he spit, wrenching his hand away. "I didn't ask to be born, but you made me and here I am and you put me through _hell."_ His eyes filled with uncontrollable tears. "You took _Jane._"

God, standing up, seemed to tower over him and Her sheer power, Her immeasurable presence in the room, silenced him, though he continued to glare at Her, with hatred and accusation gleaming in his eyes. "Adam…" her voice sent his anger rushing backward, leaving fear and confusion naked in his mind, "I_ gave _you Jane."

He sucked in a breath, his eyes locked with hers and understanding flowing between them. "And I threw her away," he finished, and his voice was choked, because he was crying and because blame had caught up with him and held him tightly in its grip.

God leaned across the table on Her elbows, a single tear running down her cheek: "You have reasons to be angry at me, Adam. But this one…" she paused, allowing him time to both brace himself and let it sink in and lodge itself in his brain and never leave him: "this one's on you."

Adam woke up, breathing hard, tears running down his cheeks. Alone in the shed, he cried for Jane and for God's forgiveness. And for the first time since his mother died, he prayed.


End file.
